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Discussion on: I Am A PhD Astrophysicist American Expat in Ireland, A Lead Software Developer, and Training for a Marathon, Ask Me Anything!

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Budy

what kind of software do you think you can develop in the field of Astrophysic?

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Andrew (he/him)

High-energy, particle, and nuclear physicists mainly use C++. There is a huge package of scientific computing tools developed by CERN called ROOT, which is written in C++ but interfaces with Python and R. ROOT is used for simple analysis, machine learning, visualisation and so on.

It's not the easiest package to get used to but it has a crazy catalog of features. And because it all runs in C++ it is extremely fast, which is very important when you're looking at scientific data that could be TB or even PB in size.

So I'm not sure what new software could be developed. Most of the sciences use low-level features from languages like FORTRAN, C, or C++ because speed is usually the most important thing. I used FORTRAN in undergrad and mostly C and C++ in graduate school.